The Useful Book: 201 Life Skills They Used to Teach in Home Ec and Shop by Sharon and David Bowers (Workman Publishing paperback, 2016), 404 pages, $19.95
The Useful Book, written by Sharon and David Bowers and illustrated by Sophia Nicolay, explains more than 201 life skills, such as how to boil water and how to fold a fitted sheet.
Concise chapters exhaustively cover even the most banal of tasks in the culinary arts, domestic arts and domestic repair.
Each skill gets its own neatly arranged chapter with numbered steps alongside simple, minimalist illustrations that are as easy on the eyes as they are informative.
In fact, the design concept of the entire project is immaculate, its simple but detailed layout and illustrations crisply complementing the text. It is color coded, with the red ink denoting "home economics" and basic life skills and the blue ink detailing construction, carpentry and other "shop" skills.
Topics range from the very simple to the complicated, from the banal and everyday to the more exotic. Each topic gets the same number of pages, whether the topic is cracking an egg or catching mice.
One chapter is a revelatory guide on how to fold the ever-frustrating fitted sheet. Another teaches you how to make sushi. Learn to build a chessboard, stop your pipes from freezing, polish a pair of shoes, make a dingy T-shirt white again. There is such a variety of skills here that anyone who studiously read the book cover to cover would become the paragon Jack of all trades.
This is a surprisingly enjoyable read. There is a strange pleasure to be found in detailed descriptions of basic activities. The book can be cracked open at any point for a new lesson every time you sit down, and it is very difficult to close it without having learned something.
Some readers might question the usefulness of such a tome in the internet age, when terabytes of information on any and all topics are just a Google search away. Those readers may have a point: Tomes like this, as well presented as they are, are quickly becoming as obsolete as some of the skills being taught.
But for those who are not the most deft Googlers or those who simply would rather feel something real in their hands and read from a page and not a backlit screen, The Useful Book is a well organized, well presented and well written alternative.
ActiveStyle on 06/27/2016